SAN DIEGO – Russell Martin wasn’t trying to make light of a regrettable situation. The Dodgers’ struggling All-Star catcher didn’t mean to be flip about the fact he accidentally had nailed teammate Delwyn Young with a line drive during batting practice, eventually resulting in Young making a trip to a local hospital for a CAT scan that came back negative.

Martin was just being honest.

“It was the hardest one I hit all day, for sure,” he said.

On an afternoon when San Diego’s Jake Peavy looked every bit the part of a reigning Cy Young Award winner, sticking the outclassed Dodgers with a 4-1 loss in front of 38,819 on Saturday at Petco Park, it might have been the hardest ball hit by anyone in a blue-and-gray jersey.

Peavy held the Dodgers to two hits and a walk and struck out eight batters in his sixth career complete game. It might have been his fourth career shutout if an alert manager Joe Torre hadn’t reminded the umpires the Dodgers were entitled to an automatic run after Padres catcher Josh Bard slid into the dugout catching a foul ball with Rafael Furcal on third.

For the glass-half-full crowd, today is a new day, and the Dodgers still have a chance to take two of three in this early season showdown. But the harsh reality is it gets no easier.

Awaiting the Dodgers in the series finale is Padres right-hander Chris Young, like Peavy one of the league’s toughest pitchers. After that, on Monday night at Arizona, they will face Dan Haren, a former All-Star who won 43 games over the past three seasons with Oakland.

And then, on Friday night at Dodger Stadium, they’ll get Peavy again. The same Peavy who improved to 10-1 with a 2.21 ERA in 19 career starts against them.

And therein lies the Dodgers’ dilemma in the National League West in 2008.

This is a division chock full of marquee starting pitchers. This time, in Peavy’s case, the Dodgers weren’t up to the challenge. But this hardly is an isolated event. In recent years, they almost never have been up to the challenge.

“That’s what this division is going to be all about,” Dodgers infielder Mark Sweeney said. “There is a lot of good pitching, and our lineup … I don’t think we have everything going all at once right now. But you have to give credit to a guy like (Peavy), because that is going to happen from time to time.”

In the Dodgers’ case, it seems to happen all too often.

Last season, when the Dodgers finished a disappointing fourth in the NL West, there were 13 games in which they faced the No. 1 starter of one of the teams that finished ahead of them: Arizona’s Brandon Webb, Colorado’s Jeff Francis and Peavy. The Dodgers won just one of those games in coming from behind to beat the Rockies on Aug. 19 when Francis was long gone.

In those 13 games, Webb, Francis and Peavy combined to go 10-0 with a 1.78 ERA. And based on Peavy’s latest masterpiece, in which he threw just 116 pitches, retired the side in order in six innings and disposed of the Dodgers in a crisp two hours, 21 minutes, nothing seems to have changed much.

“Pretty impressive,” said Torre, who never had seen Peavy pitch in person.

“Obviously, he has been doing this a long time. He just comes after you.”